The Embodied Statistician

Arthur M Glenberg,Elizabeth R Marsh

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00184

Abstract

How do infants, children, and adults learn grammatical rules from the mere observation of grammatically structured sequences? We present an embodied hypothesis that (a) people covertly imitate stimuli; (b) imitation tunes the particular neuromuscular systems used in the imitation, facilitating transitions between the states corresponding to the successive grammatical stimuli; and (c) the discrimination between grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli is based on differential ease of imitation of the sequences. We report two experiments consistent with the embodied account of statistical learning. Experiment 1 demonstrates that sequences composed of stimuli imitated with different neuromuscular systems were more difficult to learn compared to sequences imitated within a single neuromuscular system. Experiment 2 provides further evidence by showing that selectively interfering with the tuned neuromuscular system while attempting to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sequences disrupted performance only on sequences imitated by that particular neuromuscular system. Together these results are difficult for theories postulating that grammatical rule learning is based primarily on abstract statistics representing transition probabilities.

Highlights

We speak grammatical English without being able to say much about the rules of English grammar
We describe and test an embodied mechanism for statistical learning that is consistent with the notion of modality constraints but that suggests why the phenomenon is robust enough to be classified as a general learning process
Materials and Methods This study was approved by the Arizona State University (ASU) IRB and was conducted in accordance with the approved standards

Summary

Introduction

We speak grammatical English without being able to say much about the rules of English grammar. One answer is given by the study of statistical learning, which is the ability to learn (often without intent) which sequences of stimuli are consistent with a set of rules It has been observed in both infants and adults, in the visual, auditory, and tactile domains, and in a variety of stimulus displays from simple to complex to real-world scenes (Reber, 1967; Saffran et al, 1996, 1999; Fiser and Aslin, 2001, 2005; Saffran, 2001; Creel et al, 2004; Conway and Christiansen, 2005; Brady and Oliva, 2008). One explanation of the phenomenon is that it reflects a domain-general learning process: the brain is wired to pick up and represent statistics Another (Conway and Christiansen, 2006) is that this learning is modality-constrained. We describe and test an embodied mechanism for statistical learning that is consistent with the notion of modality constraints but that suggests why the phenomenon is robust enough to be classified as a general learning process

Methods

Results

Conclusion